We Need Better Food Choices

The American public seems very much to want to learn more about its food. Recently, for instance, an unprecedented 1 million people signed a letter to ask the Food and Drug Administration to label genetically modified crops. (The F.D.A. counted the petition as just one among 394 comments received.) But while more education is necessary, it’s not sufficient to get us to eat better.

If unhealthy ingredients are unavoidable in processed food, or if you lack time to prepare healthy options, then no amount of education will help.

Imagine that food producers, manufacturers and processors were to give up their legislative battles, and that food packaging involved full disclosure. We’d still be left scratching our heads. As a gateway to understanding how to eat, an ingredient list is a portal the size of a postage stamp. “Sugar,” for instance, covers a range of substances. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have suggested that we need to know much more about what kind of sugar is in our food. Maltose is relatively benign. Fructose is associated with diabetes, heart disease, and, early studies suggest, cancer and cognitive decline.

In this dream world, we would be sufficiently educated to know not only what we were eating and where our food came from, but also who was hurt in its manufacture, what its environmental footprint was, and what its consequences would be for us and the planet. You might think that in this fantasy, we’d be free to make informed, rational choices about our food. Yet many of us would continue to eat poorly, because education is only one of many factors that shape what we eat.

If no healthy food choices are available where you live, if you are too poor to afford those choices, if unhealthy ingredients are largely unavoidable in processed food, or if you lack sufficient time to prepare healthy options, then no amount of knowledge will help us eat better food.

In an effort to keep regulation light, the food industry is keen to promote the idea that poor food choices are a sign of deficient individual knowledge, and that all the public needs is more information. Yet environment, income, culture, subsidies, entitlements, industrial production techniques and marketing all shape the way we eat. Eating better means addressing these constraints through regulation and social change, so that we might make healthy individual choices that are genuinely our own.

Yes, we certainly need and want better education. But only the food industry fixates on this aspect.